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Pretty Good Hat

Excel is Complex, Untestable and Everywhere

The Power of Excel:

But while Excel the program is reasonably robust, the spreadsheets that people create with Excel are incredibly fragile. There is no way to trace where your data come from, there’s no audit trail (so you can overtype numbers and not know it), and there’s no easy way to test spreadsheets, for starters. The biggest problem is that anyone can create Excel spreadsheets—badly. Because it’s so easy to use, the creation of even important spreadsheets is not restricted to people who understand programming and do it in a methodical, well-documented way.

When traders pose for press photos it’s always in front of wildly-sophisticated looking visualizations, but the secret layer of MS Excel-based analysis puts the lie to that pretension of rigor.